Linnaeus: Nature and Nation

Cumbreland, Rhode Island, U.S.A.: Harvard Univ Pr. New. 1999. Hardcover. 0674097459 .*** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request *** - *** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT - BRAND NEW, FLAWLESS COPY, NEVER OPENED -- 298 pages." Drawing on letters, poems, notebooks, and secret diaries, Lisbet Koerner tells the moving story of one of the most famous naturalists who ever lived, the Swedish-born botanist and systematizer, Carl Linnaeus. The first scholarly biography of this great Enlightenment scientist in almost one hundred years, Linnaeus also recounts for the first time Linnaeus' grand and bizarre economic projects: to "teach" tea, saffron, and rice to grow on the Arctic tundra and to domesticate buffaloes, guinea pigs, and elks as Swedish farm animals. Koerner's narrative goes against the grain of Linnaean scholarship old and new by analyzing not how modern Linnaeus was, but how he understood science in his time. 'It is commonplace to celebrate [Linnaeus] as the inventor of binomial nomenclature and the founder of modern biological systematics … Lisbet Koerner's fine biography, however, reveals a very different man. Linnaeus attempted to defraud the Uppsala Science Society by doubling his expenses for field work in Lapland (he even drew a map with lengthy and fictive travel routes). He anonymously wrote glowing reviews of his own books for Stockholm newspapers … Finally, and poignantly, Koerner portrays Linnaeus as a man who failed at his lifelong goal of making Sweden economically self-sufficient through the science of natural history.' " (from Science) -- with a bonus offer-- .